


my heart's been borrowed and yours has been blue

by loudamy



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Peraltiago, Pining, not trying to hide it lmao, teddy features but it's ok bc I hate him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-05 05:14:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20483447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loudamy/pseuds/loudamy
Summary: (She laughs, frail and silvery, but it’s not for him, and suddenly, he faces an unfriendly paradox, because how can the only thing that’s killing him make him feel so alive?)In which Jake and Amy struggle with, and eventually succumb to, their magnetic attraction. Mutual pining circa late s1/early s2 + established relationship.





	my heart's been borrowed and yours has been blue

**Author's Note:**

> inspired in part by ‘lover’ (taylor swift) which is where the fic title comes from.
> 
> my soul physically hurts every time I see Jake’s face at the end of tactical village and unsolvable and don’t get me started on that tiny look amy gives jake in the car in road trip. so I hope this is cathartic for anyone else who feels the same pain when they watch those eps as it was for me to write it.

i. Jake

When she laughs, it’s this delicate, airy thing. It flutters through her lips, always barely ajar.

When Amy laughs, her eyes still hold that endless inky hue, but there are threads of liquid gold there, and when Jake turns, he feels them like the warm breath of the sun, roving him, discerning him like she would a case.

When she laughs for _him_, the bells of it beat against his heart like a thousand papery wings.

It doesn’t matter if it’s short and subdued, across their monitors when she’s been working too long on some undoubtedly immaculate report and he needs her to smile. It doesn’t matter if it’s the kind that reverberates through her entire chest, maybe she’s two drinks in, maybe she’s buoyed on good company and better wine.

When Amy laughs for him, he’s intoxicated by it, by her. His chest constricts, his smile lapses into something organically _Jake, _genuine, uninhibited.

When she laughs for someone else – he doesn’t mean Rosa, or Charles, or the like – Jake can’t understand why there’s this hollow cavity in the back of his throat.

She laughs, now, frail and silvery, but it’s not for him, it’s for the man whose space she’s leaning into, propped up by the bar, and suddenly, jarringly, he faces an unfriendly paradox.

Because how can the _only thing _that’s killing him make him feel so alive? He’s so unbelievably frustrated, that one minute he’s tossing peanuts and their seemingly innocuous conversation is gently dissipating into the night air, and the next he’s lying awake and sleep is a faraway thing at the back of his mind because all he can think about is Amy, and her vaguely disgruntled expression, covered in paper streamers as he advanced towards her, ring box in hand, and yes, her goddamn laugh.

When she laughs, she takes Jake’s heart in her hands, and clenches.

He drains his Pilsner, lets the bland taste settle and ease him into that familiar, numb feeling. Terry talks, but it’s white noise against the thrumming in his skull.

‘Jake? You okay?’

He blinks. That’s not Terry’s voice.

‘I’m going to call Sharon,’ Terry interjects. Amy, standing a little awkwardly by their little corner table, smiles and nods, but her eyes don’t shift from Jake’s face, which is crested with a hot, tell-tale flush.

Terry’s chair rattles as he heaves himself up. The table groans and Terry’s unfinished drink slops over the edge, pooling next to Jake’s hand. The cold liquid permeates his reverie, reminds him that this isn’t some fever dream.

‘Yeah, fine.’ Jake says, and Amy takes Terry’s vacant seat, fingers curling tightly around her empty wine glass. ‘Celebrating, you know.’

‘Right.’ Amy says, squinting at him. ‘Only, you’re tucked in a corner brooding. If you’d solved case fifty-two-a-b-x slash three-two-q-j last month we’d never have heard the end of it. Orange soda fountains erupting onto the ceiling, and everything.’

‘I guess it’s just not that big a deal.’ Jake shrugs, and concern lines Amy’s face. It’s not the first time he’s seen her visibly worried for him, they’ve been friends for years and partners for longer, but he has to swallow the rising unease in his throat.

‘Jake…’

She trails off, stilled perhaps by his guarded posture: the tense shoulders, the brittle angle of his elbows, the white edge to his knuckles against his glass.

Whatever she wants to say, he’s not ready to hear it, because he’s not even fully come to terms with whatever it his he’s feeling for her himself, only that staring into her face, lovely even when creased with uncertainty – uncertainty that he’s put there – hurts in a way he doesn’t want to further ponder.

And maybe she’s not even sure of it herself, because she abruptly averts her gaze, and they’re silent for a tortuous few seconds until –

‘You ready to go, Amy?’

Teddy hovers by the table, wearing a token smile. Jake doesn’t want to look at him, doesn’t want to see his proffered hand envelop Amy’s and snake around her waist, doesn’t want to be party to their newfound intimacy.

‘Yes. Yeah. Uh – Jake –’

He looks up. He can’t not. It’s Amy. He’d do just about anything for her when her voice breaks like that, an almost imperceptible tremor.

‘-see you tomorrow.’

He raises his glass in a feeble toast, manages an equally feeble smile. He can tell she’s not appeased by his poor attempt at nonchalance, but he wants her to take that allure of a quiet cab ride home, her obligatory two glasses of water before bed, of Teddy’s stable presence throughout it all.

Jake wants her, beyond those fragile vestiges of selfishness that _tear _at him, to be happy. He wants that laugh to be coaxed out of her continuously, never mind if it can’t be him that does it (that doesn’t mean he won’t keep trying) and there’s that shift, that tangible click in his heart, because he has it bad for Amy Santiago, and this was maybe the lonely path he was always meant to tread, and it’s only now he’s realising he can’t shake it, _her_, from the imprint she’s made on his life, in his heart.

She always was thorough, Amy.

He allows Charles and Terry to pour shot after shot down his throat, relishes the heavy burn, because it chases away the hollow ache, if only for the night.

x

_Your dress makes you look like a mermaid._

Stupid, he thinks, nursing the papercut from rifling through the accounts book in his mouth. Stupid, that he wears his heart on his sleeve. It only ever seems to leave him slowly bleeding out.

Lately, his vocal cords have been fighting an unending battle. His mouth, apparently, likes to spite him; he just can’t ever speak the words that come to mind.

‘I got pictures,’ he says, breathily when he finally finds Amy and Holt on the dancefloor. She’s sitting with one leg propped up on a nearby chair, haphazardly holding an ice-pack to the ankle, which is red from the cold. They’re engaged in some typically uncomfortable conversation; she’s babbling, he’s listening with customary stoic eyes and a solemn upper lip.

She must be grateful for his interruption, because she smiles, bright and blinding against the strip of sequins, and before he knows what he’s doing, he’s offering her a steady arm and pulling her cloddishly up against his side.

‘We’d better keep up the pretence until we’re out of here.’ says Amy, her breath flush against his ear. ‘That guard’s still watching us.’

Jake tries not to take her willingness to be held by him as anything more than the meticulousness with which she conducts all of her cases. His hand quivers as it finds purchase on the dip of her waist.

‘I will meet you back at the car.’ says Holt. ‘We will have to get changed back at the thrift store. And Peralta, send me the pictures. Hopefully the rest of the squad will have managed to somehow stall the hearing so your appalling tardiness will not adversely impact the decision.’

‘Appalling tardiness? This is barely late by Peralta standards.’ says Jake, grinning. Holt responds with a few seconds of silent disdain; Amy rolls her eyes but doesn’t even try to suppress the accompanying smile.

He doesn’t wonder what that might mean.

‘I didn’t know you could dance.’ Amy says, as they shuffle away from the other competitors and the music dwindles down to a low hum.

‘Three-drink-Jake has far more self-control than his counterpart.’

‘Really?’ Amy says incredulously. ‘I once saw you backflip – or should I say _attempt _to backflip – in mid-air in Sal’s after three whiskeys and knock down the neon sign.’

‘Yeah, that really didn’t help with the debt.’ Jake rubs the back of his neck sheepishly.

‘Crushing debt,’ she says, and just like that, he falters.

Does she not know? Does she not understand that that night on the roof so ably decomposed his every effort at maintaining a purely platonic friendship, the effort he’d so tentatively constructed from day one? That maybe he’d been foolishly suppressing his attraction to her, his gargantuan-but-inoffensive crush on her since the day she swept into the ninety-ninth precinct and asked him, ever so courteously, if he wouldn’t mind restricting his mountainous pile of clutter to his own desk? That everything is _different _now, he can’t hear her say those words without flashing back to _you’re not allowed to fall in love with me _and _won’t be a problem _and scattered peanuts and plastic blue dresses and spinning her wildly around Shaw’s, and her dark eyes set alight by the city and burning into his soul?

She’s his friend, first and foremost. He won’t give that up for anything, even for his wasted heart. He’ll curb every slip of the tongue, stare at arrest reports until the ink bleeds into incomprehensible squiggles if it means he’s not staring at her over their monitors, stop gratuitously telling her she looks great, because it’s never truly captured the magnitude of her beauty, anyway.

‘You do know me.’

There’s something beyond her responding smile, but he’ll let it go. Another missed moment.

Another unspoken sentiment.

x

She bobs just out of sight, car keys spilling from her hand, hair tousled and impossibly shiny, and the chasm between all the _work _he’s put in to ignore these burgeoning feelings and the way Amy makes him feel, brilliant and breathless, the way her smile fills him up, crumbles at his fingertips.

‘I kind of wish something could happen between us.’

_Stupid._

‘Romantic-stylez.’

_Stupid._

He opens his heart, in his clumsy but incurably honest way. He watches her mouth twitch and lips part, scans every crevice of her face, the myriad of emotions that flicker there, surprise and wonder and well, he doesn’t stick around for anything else, his heartbeat is pulsing sickeningly in his ears, he’s tipsy with adrenaline and her loveliness in the dim orange light. He can’t speak, he can’t even breathe to save his life.

He’ll see her face every night for the next six months, in the strange void before he slips into unconsciousness. It doesn’t begin to compare to the real thing.

But right now, a little dazed, and half in love with her, he walks away.

ii. Amy

Amy’s no stranger to pining.

Her high school years were coloured by fly-by-night infatuations and fleeting pecks on the cheek and crushes that were little more than dust in the wind.

But, she realises now, none of that compares to the slow, searing burn of watching Jake with someone else.

Because, she laments, her fingers curling around her untouched beer, it’s someone else that can card her fingers through the shock of curls that grazes his forehead. It’s someone else who’s laughing at his lame jokes and wacky impressions and his reflex of being adorably facetious about absolutely everything. It’s someone else who he huddles up with in a dim, secluded corner of Shaw’s and who inhales his warm, sugary musk and meets those eyes, like liquid sunshine, and God, when did this happen? When did these thoughts begin? When did she start letting them entangle her, letting _Jake _into her head when her apartment’s too silent and the single eye of the moon hits her window just right? When did everything go to hell?

It crept up on her gently, this…whatever it is, for Jake Peralta. Jake, of all people. Jake, who puts orange soda in his cereal and teases her relentlessly and spams her with unsolicited texts, the grammatical accuracy of which vary widely depending on how drunk he is and how much he wants to annoy her. Jake, who’s reckless and impulsive and whose paperwork is often a tapestry of sticky ink smears and who bursts into song midway through a stakeout because ‘you haven’t smiled in an hour, Santiago, and your face could crack a mirror’.

Amy stares resolutely into the dark amber liquid of her bottle and her breath hitches because she knows. She knows that all these stupid things that first infuriated her about this careless man-child who wears stained jeans to work and makes sextape jokes in adult conversation and will have some kind of disgusting snack about his person at any given time have somehow fed into all the dumb, distinctive traits she positively adores about him.

Because yeah, Jake’s a bit of a human disaster and she’s pretty sure if she didn’t regularly remove muffin wrappers and banana skins from his desk there’d be new life forms growing on it by now. But he’s also Jake, who she trusts more than any partner she’s ever had. Jake, who somehow memorised her very complicated coffee order within a week of her starting at the nine-nine. Jake, who loves it when she cracks out her baton and takes down a perp with one fell swoop (‘I know this is probably a bad time, but I can’t lie, that turned me on a bit’). Jake, who wrote her an unpolished but glowing letter of recommendation she may or may not have folded up neatly in a desk drawer. Jake, who told her she looked like a mermaid and brings her granola bars on stakeouts so she doesn’t forget to eat and makes her laugh, God, he makes her laugh without even trying.

But Teddy’s her boyfriend. Teddy’s waiting for her at home, having sent her three texts in the past hour about the new concoctions he’s made with his home-brewing kit. Teddy, who is solid and safe and reliable and mind-numbingly, inescapably _boring_.

Teddy, who she’s breaking up with next week.

‘Santiago.’

‘I thought you were playing that guy at darts.’ says Amy, as Rosa swings up onto the adjacent barstool. Her movements are a little more fluid than usual, so she’s probably a few drinks deeper than Amy is.

‘Crushed him. Dum-dum throws with his elbows stuck out like a damn chicken.’

Amy snorts, and Rosa shakes her head, frowning.

‘Why are you sitting over here by yourself? It’s karaoke night. You love karaoke night.’ Rosa signals to the bartender and slouches into her seat in a manner that suggests Amy can’t brush off her questions too easily.

‘I’m not in the mood.’ she says, and if her eyes land on Jake and Sophia, chuckling together in the corner, it’s only a little bit accidentally-on-purpose.

‘The lawyer.’ Rosa cocks an eyebrow as the barkeep slides a jack and coke towards her. ‘Wow, your timing sucks.’

‘I know that, thanks.’

‘This isn’t like you.’ says Rosa, and her voice conveys the same frustration that Amy’s been wrestling with all evening, so she finally looks her friend in the eye. ‘I mean it. Moping by yourself, barely touching your drink. Normally you’d be buzzing around, bragging about all the new ideas you’ve got to impress Holt, annoying the crap out of everyone. You’re acting like Peralta was last y-’

She cuts off, coughs gruffly, but the damage has been done.

‘Like Jake was when he liked me, you mean.’ Amy fiddles with the ring on her right hand. ‘Did you give him this talk as well?’

Rosa says nothing, so there’s her answer.

‘What advice did you give him?’ says Amy, quietly.

‘I told him to get over you.’ Rosa says, bluntly, and she doesn’t look remotely abashed. ‘Date someone else, bang a stranger. He didn’t want to at first. But then he came back, and you were still with the boring dude, and I think he started to accept that you guys aren’t gonna break up.’

Amy acknowledges this new information with a swig of her beer. It’s lukewarm by this point, but still soothing.

‘He still likes you, you know that, right?’

Her head snaps up.

‘I’m not telling you this so you can go and make some big confession.’ Rosa continues, doggedly. ‘I don’t think that’d be a good idea. And frankly I’m already _way _more invested in this middle-school crap then I’m happy with. But-’

She pauses, glancing meaningfully over at Jake and Sophia.

‘-that’s never going to last.’

With that, she hops gracelessly off her stool and advances on some poor soul playing pool across the room.

Amy rubs two fingers rhythmically against her temple. She’s wrong. Jake’s feelings for her, however potent they may have once been, were trampled into the ground when Sophia came along.

She twists her neck back, catches a glimpse of them. Sophia’s talking animatedly, Jake’s leaning into her in a way that makes Amy’s heart lurch, but then he looks up and catches her eye. That crooked half-smile flits at the corner of his mouth, soft and yearning and a little sad.

Jake is _over _her. She has to believe that. She has to protect her heart.

x

She tries to distract herself with the passing blur of autumnal scenery, the string of poplar red trees, the blush of leaves scattered on the road ahead, but her mind is stupidly fixated on the lazy movement of Jake’s forearms on the wheel. Nice forearms, she thinks, easily wrapped around her back whilst he thumbs her jaw –

‘You okay?’

It should be a ridiculous question, because of course she isn’t, not really. What would have been an unassuming trip and tidy end to another of their cases somehow turned into the road trip from hell, of naked photos and maple-tinis and what Jake assured her was a menagerie of very creepy dolls. Oh, and she dumped Teddy in possibly the messiest, most public fashion possible, in front of Jake and his girlfriend.

Oh, and she admitted – under duress – that she most definitely had (has) feelings for her partner. Also in front of said partner. And his girlfriend.

She tries to understand Teddy lashing out like that, and now that she can freely admit that she’s been falling for Jake since that night on the roof, irrecoverably so since ‘romantic-stylez’, perhaps his vindictive comments at dinner weren’t solely prompted by the apparently unexpected dumping, but the fact that his girlfriend has been gradually slipping away from him since before they even resumed their relationship.

She remembers cancelling on Teddy after Jake rocked her to the core with his confession, because suddenly she was in no mood for Pilsners and mild conversation and milder sex that never quite leaves her fulfilled, nor with any appetite for more. She remembers sitting on her bathroom floor, finger pressed to his contact photo, thumb hovering over the call button. She remembers the resounding emptiness that filled her whenever she glanced over at his vacant desk.

Now, she thinks about _did you? _and _maybe, yes, a little _and the look on his face she’ll never forget, no matter how quickly he tried to hide it, so filled with light and awe and undisguised happiness. A window into his soul.

She tells him she’s fine, that she’s glad it’s over, and he smiles reassuringly. Her mouth tingles with the cloying aftertaste of the blue soda.

Something’s changed between them. She can’t put her finger on exactly what, won’t even pull at that thread, because he’s still with Sophia, isn’t he, and above anything she won’t overstep, won’t broach uncharted waters, because Jake is her _friend _and if her feelings are more complicated than mere friendship allows, that can’t take precedence over their friendship. He seems to be on board with this, unable to resist teasing her in that old, familiar way that used to rile her up without fail, but now warms her from the inside. She has to show him the line, of course, because it’s Jake and sometimes he forgets that professional police colleagues don’t bring up inappropriate crushes, but it remains. Something’s changed between them.

So for now, she just lets him take her home.

x

When Sophia breaks up with Jake, Amy observes the changes in him with varying degrees of concern.

He fluctuates between obsessively checking his phone to erratically tearing through case files to interrogating perps with a renewed, slightly manic vigour. Beneath the explicit changes, however, what she observes worries her more. Bruises beneath his eyes. Inebriated murmurs about the crushing loneliness. He’s a hot mess.

Yes, she still likes him. But she’s professional, dating cops is decidedly not, and he’s her friend. So she goes through the motions of what a friend does.

She texts him a live commentary throughout Jeopardy (mostly bitching about the clueless contestants and their apparent apathy for Latin) and laughs with him about it over a vending machine lunch the next day. She tells Charles _not _to bring Jake his post-Vivian matrix getup and still nags him about not letting his miscellaneous crap encroach onto her desk to ensure normalcy and argues with him about whether or not Die Hard can be considered a modern-day classic.

It works; the dark rings beneath his eyes lessen, their pool competitions at Shaw’s resume with an almost aggressive competitiveness, he returns to his usual colloquial diet of jokes and puns and harmless teasing.

But when she catches wind that Sophia’s started dating a court clerk from a recent B&E case she defended, and comes into work the next day where Jake is slumped at his desk, the definite scent of stale whiskey about him, Amy pulls out the case file she’d been saving for that evening from her handbag and deposits herself into the seat by his name plaque.

‘So I arrested someone this morning,’ she says, and at the sound of her voice Jake lifts his head slightly and looks at her with red eyes and she very nearly loses her nerve. ‘A doctor.’

‘Oh yeah? Did you put him under cardiac arrest?’ Jake grins, and it’s not even a little forced, so she reciprocates easily before continuing.

‘He’d been writing illegal prescriptions for patients and selling them on the black market.’ Amy says, and Jake nods, clearly unsure of where this might be going but invested nonetheless.

‘You want to know how I was tipped off that it was him, and not one of his colleagues?’

‘His stethoscope technique?’ Jake suggests, but Amy shakes her head excitedly.

‘His handwriting was legible.’

‘Wait, what?’ Jake exclaims, pushing back from his desk at once. ‘You said that was just conjecture and not solid enough grounds for arresting someone!’

‘You were right.’ Amy shrugs. ‘Doctors don’t have intelligible handwriting. Not real ones, anyway. Plus, I found the prescription pad he was using, but the handwriting was my first clue.’

‘You’re just lucky our bet is over.’ Jake wags his finger at her, but he’s smiling, really smiling, and her heart is backflipping if only because she did it, he’s distracted and no longer crumpled over his desk in that awful way. ‘I should definitely get the collar for this one.’

‘Fat chance, Peralta,’ she says, picking her way across the bullpen towards Holt’s office, leaving him standing, beaming, in her wake.

iii. 

When it finally happens, three spontaneous kisses, each so distinct from the last, it’s as though those wasted months of brittle heartbreak and longing and lamenting with eyes at half-mast and words trapped on the edge of a tongue…are mindlessly swept away.

‘I can’t believe we wasted so much time,’ Amy says, anyway, in the post-coital haze. Her forehead glistens and Jake sleepily peels a damp curl away from her eyes.

‘I don’t care.’ he says, with such conviction despite the time of night and the fact that they’ve completely worn each other out in the past two or so hours. ‘You're here. I'm here. We're here. Finally. That's enough for me.’

There’s a twinge in her heart, a soft shiver that she can’t suppress and Jake must feel, because he pulls her tighter against him. She can’t even revel in the fact that her fantasy about being bracketed in those forearms is actually coming true, she’s too preoccupied with his declaration.

She doesn’t know where this is going, but she knows she wants to be wherever he is. She wants to hold him this close, always, wants to feel the brag of his heartbeat against hers.

She’s loaned her heart to someone else; his has been unfairly blue for too long, toyed with by too many people. It doesn’t matter, now though, she barely remembers the sting of pining for him from a dusty corner.

He murmurs something incomprehensible, sweet and resolute, into her hair. It might be _I love you_, it might be a million other things; but they have so, so long to figure that out.

And now, well, now: all’s well that ends well to end up with Jake.

**Author's Note:**

> I actually did some diss reading today so I rewarded myself by writing this in 4 hours which is why it's a little rough, but as always I really appreciate hearing your thoughts <3
> 
> come find me on tumblr @vic-kovac


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